The Suspended Step of the Stork

Angelopoulos went into the 1991 Cannes competition with a film that had already caused a scandal at home: the Bishop of Grevena had objected to shooting in his diocese, and the resulting row gave The Suspended Step of the Stork a political charge before anyone had seen it. Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau — two faces from a completely different European cinema — anchor it.

The setting is a town on Greece's northern frontier that the film calls the waiting room, crowded with Kurds, Albanians and Turks who have arrived and cannot proceed. A young television journalist working on a report about them fixes on an elderly man he believes to be a politician who walked away from parliament and public life without explanation. He arranges for the man's wife to travel up and confirm it. Giorgos Arvanitis shot the border in flat winter light, and the film's signature image — a soldier holding one leg raised above a painted line, because to lower it is to be in another country — is among the most quoted in Angelopoulos's work.

Made as the Iron Curtain came down and the Balkans began to come apart, it reads now as the film in which his preoccupations turned from Greek history to European borders. Critics at the time thought the reporter too thin a protagonist. The subject has only grown, and the film's central question — what a line on the ground is actually made of — has not dated at all.